The Theft of Carnaval: National Spectacle and Racial Politics in Rio de Janeiro

The Theft of Carnaval: National Spectacle and Racial Politics in Rio de Janeiro Author(s): Robin E. Sheriff Reviewed work(s): Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 3-28 Published by: Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656527 .

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The Theft of Carnaval: National Spectacle and Racial Politics in Rio de Janeiro Robin E. Sheriff Florida International University

Rio de Janeiro,many Brazilians and foreigners agree, is a monumentalcity. The capital of Brazil until 1960, Rio has both an illustrious history andnaturalsplendor. Steep granite hills, some of them populatedby the city's poor, share space with modern high-rise buildings. The crescent-shaped beaches of the wealthy South Zone continue to draw touristsfrom as far away as Europe and the United States, despite internationalreportsof violent streetcrime. When I arrivedthere in the last weeks of 1990, I felt a tingling sense of achievement. Even poor migrants,whose reasons for leaving the impoverishedcountryside are anythingbut abstract,are drawnto Rio partlyby its glamour.

The allure of Rio de Janeiromay be an effect produced less by its startling topographyand breathtakingvistas thanby what touristbrochuresare apt to call its "spirit."The magic of Rio is constructed,really, from a collectively imagined and ideologically managed enchantment.Accepted within everyday discourses throughoutBrazil as something of a metonymic enactment of national culture and character,Rio is portrayedas exuberantly spontaneous, "racially mixed," egalitarianin its ethos (if not in its objective structures),free spirited and casual, and, during certain days of the year especially, just a little bit shameless. As is the case with all such national showcases, the magic of Rio is simultaneously producedwithin and directed towardboth local and transnationalcontexts.

Rio's claim to representthe most appealing and uniquely Brazilian aspects of national culture is based largely on the city's performanceof the pre-Lenten festival of carnaval. Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta captured the symbolic resonance and national significance of the festival when he wrote, "it was not Brazil that invented Caraval; on the contrary,it was Carnavalthat invented Brazil" (1984:245). The carioca, or Rio, carnaval is based on samba, a musical genre anddance style of remarkabletenacity and hegemonic reach. This article focuses on the historical development of, and contemporarydiscourses about, Rio's samba-driven caraval and its relationship to national representation and racial politics. With "racialpolitics" I do not refer to more explicit CulturalAnthropology 14(1):3-28. Copyright? 1999, American Anthropological Association.

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4 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

forms of political discourse or to organized political activities but to dominant, everyday understandingsabout the meaning of "race"in carioca and national culture and the (largely unheard)responses of poor Brazilians of color to those understandings.The carioca carnaval,I argue, bears a metonymic relation to the Brazilian nation in ways other than those typically invoked in everyday discourses thatcelebratenationaland racial unity and civic harmony.Increasingly, the cultural politics and political economy that underpin the carioca carnaval have generateda disputeaboutcontestedmeanings,contestedrights,authenticity, appropriation,and betrayal.

I am only peripherallyconcerned here with the much debated question of whether carnaval represents, for Brazil's urban masses, a politically counterhegemonic culturalform or if, on the other hand, it is a conservatively pitched, ideologically manipulatedritualaimed at the "domestication"of the poor (Queiroz 1985). Persuasive argumentshave been presented from both sides (see, for example, Linger 1992; Queiroz 1985, 1992; Raphael 1981; Vianna 1994), and anyone who "plays"or participatesin the carioca carnavalcan perceive that it is shot through, in ideological terms, with ambiguous and contradictoryinflections. I am concerned, rather,with a vision of carnaval-and its historical embedment in visions of Rio and the Brazilian nation-that is articulatedfrom a particularangle, that of poor people of color residing in the favela, or hillside shantytown,of Morrodo Sangue Bom, where I lived and conductedresearchbetween 1990 and 1992.'

The Hill of Good Blood I first entered the community of Morro do Sangue Bom in 1988, fortuitously, I thought,duringthe centennialof the abolition of slavery in Brazil. I was searching for a field site where I might later returnto conduct research on the ways in which poor people of color articulatetheirunderstandingsof color, race, and racism. I was determinedto live in a favela (a word I quickly learned to avoid) not because of its reputedexoticism but simply because such communities are inhabited,for the most part,by poor families of color. Rio's morros, or hills, are densely populated communities of one- and two-story houses built willy-nilly on many of the city's steepest hillsides. Although lacking paved roads and constantly vulnerable to the devastation of both small and catastrophicmud slides, many such communities, including Morrodo Sangue Bom, offer magnificent views of the city, a bittersweet irony for those who are often called, with a mixtureof pity, derogation,and fear, favelados ("slumdwellers") or marginais ("criminals").For their part,people on the hill look down toward the city with as much trepidationas envy. Unlike the morro,where "todomundo se conhece" [everyoneknows each other], the city is made dangerousby its anonymity. It is not only crime thatmight give the parentsof teenagersconcern but also the ever presentpossibility that the overwatchful eyes of shopkeepers, the subtle avoidance gestures of white middle-class shoppers, or the arrogantharassment of the police might undermine one's self-confidence, one's sense of rightful cidadania, or citizenship. People living on Rio's morroscall the city as

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CARNAVALIN RIO 5

a whole o asfalto, or the asphalt, a term that highlights the distinction between the infrastructuralinvestments made in middle-class residential and business areas and the muddy pathways and open sewers of the morro.

Like many similar communities, Morrodo Sangue Bom had a residents' association with elective offices and a day care center. Much of the de facto political control of the community, however, was in the hands of the local drugtraffickinggang. The people of Morrodo Sangue Bom, many of whom had been born and raised in the community, spoke disparagingly of crime and its seemingly inevitable consequences, but they were thankful-until 1992-to be living in an epoca de paz, or period of peace. The present leader, unlike the previously incumbent one, was a son of the community in more than a merely technical sense; he andhis men did not harassthe community's five thousandor so residents, nor did they brandishtheir guns or engage in public drug use outside of those occasional days thatfollowed police shakedowns.

Jorge, the first person I met in Morrodo Sangue Bom, was an unemployed man of color who had lived in the community since his birth28 years before. He occasionally acted, through an informal arrangement,as the assistant to the presidentof theresidents'association.He was warmandwelcomingon my firstvisit, and, in response to my question aboutthe predominantconcerns and preoccupations of the community's residents, he began to talk about carnaval. Although peace had settled over the community, the good old days, Jorge told me, were clearly over. Until recently, Morro do Sangue Bom had had an award-winning bloco, or carnivalparadegroup.There were several exceptionally talented sambistas, or sambacomposers, on the hill, and their songs, animatedby the beautiful mulatas ("women of color") of the morro,had been the pride of the community. To better illustrate the tragedy of his community's loss, Jorge led me to a tiny cement structurethat housed the ruins of carnavalspast. As he pointed out with a weary gesture, a few fantasias, or costumes, glittering with sequins and piled haphazardlyon the dirt floor, were all that remained. The bloco of Morro do Sangue Bom was one of the first victims of a deepening recession; the municipal funds that made such local productionspossible had evidently driedup.

After our first meeting, Jorge arrangedfor me to spend a week in the home of his twin sister, Joia. Marriedto a man namedDaniel since she was 17, Joia had two sons and lived with her family in a dilapidatedhouse close to the hill's summit. One evening during my stay she began to talk about carnaval, something that was very close to her heart. The blocos, she explained, were small local groups composed of the men, women, and children who lived in particularcommunities or neighborhoods. Although some had received funds from the city, their creative management and production were in the hands of local people.

Preparationsbegan months in advanceas those who composed the music and selected a theme met to hammerout a unifying vision for their parade.Othersdesigned and sewed costumes, choreographedthe dancing, and organized the participants. The blocos were competitive, and, as Joia suggested, the creative and organizationalprocesses, as well as the final parade,were highly emotional focal points that were significant in producingwhat Joia and others called a sense

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6 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

of unido, or union, in the community. Although the women andmen of Morrodo Sangue Bom worked hard all year long "just to survive," their exuberant carnaval paradeshad provided the one context in which their labor and creativity were recognized and applauded not only by middle-class cariocas but by foreigners who came to the city as well. No longerjust "slumdwellers"and "criminals," they danced, spun, and sang their way down the streets, leaving a feeling of dizzy enchantmentin their wake.

As Joia explained, however, these local blocos were not the real "bigstakes" caraval. The major competition was between the much larger escolas de samba, or samba clubs. Like the blocos, each of the escolas-composed of literally thousandsof participants-developed an original samba composition, costumes, choreography, and a theme. The parades of the escolas were dominated by massive floats that were flanked by alas, or wings, each with its own conventionalized role, costumes, and choreography.Although the big escolas de samba were still associated with the hillside communities where they originated, theirmemberswere often far flung. They were managedby professionals and fundedby Rio's powerful tourismdepartmentandby bicheiros, the millionaire kingpins of Brazil's illegal numbersgame.

It was duringour first conversationaboutcamaval thatJoia excused herself and went to retrieve a stack of dog-eared magazines from the back of a drawer.

Flipping through their pages, she showed me pictures of Daniel, dressed in white, spinning a tambourineon one finger like a top and gesturing toward a dancing woman. It was, as I later learned, the classic pose of the passista, a traditional figure of the escolas de sambaof Rio de Janeiro.Passistas are chosen for their agility and their good looks; they are loosely partneredwith, and provide percussive accompanimentfor, the gyrating mulataswho most personify samba as a dance form. Although Daniel remained anonymous in the sense that his name never appearedin the captions underneaththe photos, he was clearly, with his muscled build, his wide smile, his color, and his carioca sexiness, a favorite of the photographers."Yourhusbandis famous!"I exclaimed. Joia beamed, but as our conversationcontinued she began to suggest, as Jorge had, that the days of the "real"caraval were over. The escolas used to paradeon the wide avenues of the city, she explained, but since 1984, the event was housed in the Passarela do Samba,an enormous arenapopularlyknown as the Samb6dromo."It used to be so marvelous,"she said; "Now you have to pay to get in."

During that week I asked Joia, Daniel, and some of their friends about the previous carnavaland its relationshipto the centennialof abolition. A numberof the sambaclubs had had themes about abolicdo ("abolition")and o negro ("the black"), I was told, but few details were offered. No one, it appeared,had invested much emotional energy in the celebration of the centennial. "We used to have a bloco right here on the morro, did you know that?"I was repeatedly asked.

Two years later I returned to the community to begin my research. Although Brazilian "race relations" and "black culture" had fascinated anthropologists and sociologists for half a century, there was as yet no systematic

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CARNAVALIN RIO 7

examination of discourses of color, race, and racism among urbanpoor people of color. Like the country it describes, scholarship on race in Brazil has had a dramatichistory. Particularlyafter the publication and translationof the works of Gilberto Freyre, Brazil's preeminent sociologist-historian, Brazil enjoyed a reputationas a democracia racial, or racial democracy. Although Brazil was the last New World countryto abolish slavery, Freyre, like so many of his compatriots, believed it to be immune to the antagonistic, systemic forms of racism that plagued countries such as the United States.

Following the bloodshed and genocide of World War II, UNESCO sponsored anthropological and sociological research in Brazil, with the hope of documenting how this enormous nation-composed of the descendants of "Europeans, Africans, and Indians"-accomplished and maintained its celebratedharmony.The results of these studies were equivocal. Those who studied the industrialized urban centers of the south-most of whom were Brazilian-documented the existence of racialized prejudice and discrimination(see, especially, Azevedo 1955; Bastide and van den Berghe 1957; Bastide and Fernandes 1951,1955; CardosoandIanni 1960; Costa Pinto 1953; Ferandes 1965, 1969, 1972; Ianni 1966, 1978; Nogueira 1955; Pereira 1967). However, Florestan Ferandes, the most frequently cited author in this body of literature,argued that racism was but an archaic cultural holdover from the era of slavery, one that would inevitably wither away as Brazilians of color became more fully incorporatedinto the developing capitalist economy.

U.S. researchers,who focused on the ruralareas of Brazil's northeast,also documented the existence of racialized prejudice, but they maintainedthat the behavior associated with discriminatorypractices was based not on color but on class (see, especially, Harris 1952, 1956, 1964, 1970; Harris and Kottak 1963; Hutchinson 1957; Kottak 1967; Pierson 1942; Wagley 1963a, 1963b; Zimmerman 1963). While acknowledging rigid class boundaries and the profoundpoverty of most of Brazil's people of color, CharlesWagley concluded that"Brazil remains as a lesson in racial democracy for the rest of the world" (1963b:2).

Summarizingboth popularand scholarly assumptions, Harris concluded, "Racial identity is a mild and wavering thing in Brazil" (1964:64).

More recently, scholars from a variety of disciplines have offered unequivocal and cogent challenges to what is now more often than not called the "myth of racial democracy"(for example, Andrews 1991; Burdick 1993; Fontaine 1985; Hale 1997; Hanchard 1994; Hasenbalg 1979; Skidmore 1974; Twine 1998). Centralto this revisionist scholarshipare those studies thatuse the analysis of census data to demonstratethe existence of systemic racialized discrimination(for example, Hasenbalg 1979,1985; Lovell and Dwyer 1988; Silva 1981, 1985; Wood and Carvalho1988). Nevertheless, many of the questions, assumptions, and debates that animated scholarship from the 1950s through the 1970s continue to be recycled both within and outside of the academy.Partlybecause many Brazilians avoid using words such as negro and preto, which refer directly to blackness, it is assumed, for example, that people of color do not identify as black. The failure of Brazil's small black movement organizationsto

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8 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

attractthe "masses"is frequently taken as evidence that people of color do not experience or do not recognize racialized oppression. The salience of miscegenation-itself difficult to define in a country in which so many refer to themselves as "mixed"-is often taken as prima facie evidence that racism is not a homegrown Brazilian ideology or set of practices but an importedproduct, an aberrationof those who are, in one way or another,"nottrulyBrazilian."Within the popular imagination certainly, the carioca carnaval continues to embody, and, in a sense, to enact, the ideology of democraciaracial, in that it is thought to celebratethe "Africancontribution"to Brazil at the same time thatit demands affectionate, and even promiscuous, mixing between people of different colors and classes.

Sambistas for Hire Because I wanted to gain a sense of how people in the community talked about color, race, and racism in ordinaryeveryday conversations, it was many months before I began to conduct focused interviews on these issues. Although people often referredto color and even race when they describedthe appearance of particularindividuals, racism as ideology or practice was rarely discussed.

The tepid way in which people had talked about the centennial of abolition two years before seemed confirmed by patternedsilences. When I did begin focused interviews, however, nearly all of my informantsnarratedpersonal encounters with racism. "No one wants to talk about it," many acknowledged, "buteveryone knows it exists." They did not, as their silence in everydaydiscourse seemed to suggest, accept the notion that Brazil is a racial democracy.2 Tomas, a dark-skinned19 year old, echoed many young men on the morro when he described his experiences with police harassmenton the asfalto, the public streetsof the city. Several days before our interview, for example, he had gone to anothermorroto attenda dance with his cousin. He began his account by describinghis attemptto returnhome by cab, an alternativethat was almost prohibitively expensive but one by which he might avoid a tedious and possibly threateningencounter with the police. "Here it's very difficult for people of color," Tomas explained; "[Cab drivers] think we are going to rob them." He had waited for over an hour before a taxi finally stopped for him. Almost as though it were an aside, Tomas added thatwhile he was at the dance he had been stopped, frisked, and questioned by the police. "Sometimes it's very dangerous with the police; there can be violence," Tomas said. He chuckled softly and added,"I don't have much luck when I go out." This type of encounterwas very familiar to Tomas-he knew thathe must not only cooperatebut maintain a respectful, even obsequious demeanor-but his attemptto laugh off his fear and wounded sense of dignity was only partially successful.

Like others on the morro, Tomas believed that it was his color, even more than his poverty, that made him constantly vulnerable to such harassment. I asked him if he ever discussed such incidents with his mother. "No, no, I didn't tell anyone, no. I got really sad about what happened,"he responded in a soft voice. For Tomas, as for others on the hill, there was no point in talking about

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CARNAVALIN RIO 9

racism, even among one's intimates."Iknow that we have humanrights, right?" he said; "But to complain-there's no way, so you have to let it go. It doesn't do any good."

The dance thatTomas and his cousin had gone to featuredfunk,largely imported music of the North Americanrap and hip-hop genres. Such dances, usually held in Rio's morro communities and working-class subutrbios,were typically frequented by black teenagers, but they were not, for the most part, conceptualized as a partof cultura negra, or black culture. Tomas's motherand others of her generationhad no fondness for the music, sartorialaccessories, and ritualized leisure activities associated with funk-nor, indeed, did they care for most genres of foreign pop music. While the raucous and sometimes violent nighttime world of the funk dances may have representeda kind of generational marker with a rebellious edge, its connection to politicized notions of black identity was vague at best.

Although Tomas was engaged in the fashionable and, in many ways, transnational world of funk, he hardly fit the stereotype of the callow, culturallydisaffected youth that troubled his elders on the morro and struck fear into the hearts of the middle-class people living on the asphalt. Tomas respected his community and the neighborly ethos thatheld it together, and, contraryto much of the conventional wisdom about the natureof racialized identity in his country, he embraceda notion of negritudethatwas not only peculiarly Brazilianbut carioca. When I asked Tomas if he thought there was something in his country that one might call culturanegra,he said, withouthesitation,"Thereis Macumba, African music, pagode, samba, our space within popularBrazilian music."

Tomas had named the dominantcontexts and cultural genres that conventionally define black culturein Brazil. "Macumba,"a catchall word for the West African-derived religions of Umbanda and Candombl6,provided a context for the nurturanceand modification of sacred music, which in turnconstitutedwhat some historians of Brazilian music believe to be a point of origin for the secularization,popularization,andhybridizationof what Tomas called "Africanmusic." The termpagode, while sometimes referringto a particularstyle or styles of music, is used more generally to describe the informal and playful gathering of small groups of musicians in more or less public areas; those in the "audience" often add their voices to the chorus and dance singly or in pairs. Although pagode shares much, in historical terms, with Iberian musical traditions and street life, it is often associated, in Rio at least, with poor people of color.

Pagode, for Tomas and his neighbors on the morro, is in turn associated with samba, the world-famous musical and dance genre that was "invented"by the povo, or people, and more specifically by the negros, or blacks. When Tomas referred to "our space within Brazilian popular music," he meant not only samba and samba-inspiredrhythmsbut also popularartists of color.

Samba, as Tomas suggested, was more than the beat that animatedthe activities of caraval week. Although the bittersweet nostalgia that samba seemed to invoke almost inevitably was anchored in the magic of caraval, it was also, for people on the morroparticularly,a rhythm that accompanied everyday life.

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10 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Tomas himself was a percussionist in a loosely organized group of men who played pagode. Samba was his metier. Usually, as he said, he "played for the community," but, like other poor musicians, he sometimes played for grana, a little money, to put food on his family's table. His patrons were middle-class cariocas who enlivened their birthdayparties and barbecues with live pagode groups. It was only in his role as a sambista, Tomas suggested, that he was treateddecently by the people of the asphalt: Therearemanyways, manyways, manyways like this, thatwe citizensof color don'thavemuchopportunity.We canbe musicians.BecauseI ama musicianand whenI arriveat a placethey treatme well, butwhenI'm not playing,it's another thing,theytreatme differently.... It's a bit difficultfor us; it's difficultbecause we don't have time to study.We have to work.So, it's difficultfor us to open a window.Becausewe're workers;most are domestics,womenas muchas men.

Andhe whohasa betterjob is theonewhoknowssomeone,whohasa contact.But the personwho doesn't have that and isn't educateddoesn't do anything.So, there'sno chancein life foranything.Wedon'thavea chance,do you understand?

Tomas understoodthat his tiny professional niche-based on his "authenticity" as a very darkskinned, drum-playingman from the favela-was symbolically and discursively constructedthroughan ideologically dubious route, but it was, as he suggested, all he had to bankon as a poor and uneducatedblack man.

He savored the modicum of respect that the role afforded him and lamented the fact thatbecause their "instrumentsweren't good enough"his pagode grouphad little success in playing for clubs and other more lucrative venues. When he left middle-class parties in the wee hours of the morning, he told me, the police, as though attempting to justify their harassment,often called him a nego safado ("no-accountnigger").

As a 19 year old from a very poor family, Tomas had never gone out with a caraval bloco, nor had he ever been to the Samb6dromo.As a musician for hire, however, he had a sophisticated sense of the racial and class politics of samba.

"Theonly thing we receive supportfor here in Brazil is samba,"Tomas told me, chuckling sardonically:"They gave that to the negros, samba and pagode. And caraval. ... I play pagode. But we don't have many chances.... There's no investment. No one invests in this. They give us a chance to run along behind but we are very poor and there's no investment in anything."

Tomas's sense of himself as a sambista who was permittedto "run along behind"what had become someone else's partywas hardly unique. Jorge, who saw himself as a sambista almost by birthright,also performedfor middle-class patrons. Like Tomas, he was likely to experience a disturbing combination of pride and humiliation when he was hired to entertainat parties. "The guys, myself, for example-" Jorge said, describing his intimidation on arriving at the house of a wealthy patron,"Ihave, even, a feeling of shame when I see this guy's house. You know how it is?" As Jorge describedthe occasion, he and his fellow musicians were initially shown respect. They performed tirelessly, but after a time they were subjected to racist comments that they were clearly meant to hear. They were called crioulos, a humiliating racial term that made Jorge's

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CARNAVALIN RIO 11

blood boil. "He spoke like this," Jorge explained, referring to one of the guests, "'two crioulos together are faggots or they are thieves.' " The experiences of Tomas and Jorge summarize the ideological and occupational "window" offered to black sambistas and the tenuous, fragile, and shifting nature of both their role and the occasional and evidently ambivalent respect they derive from it. "They gave that to the negros," Tomas said of samba, and although his comment seems to contradict the assertion of others on the hill that it was, in fact, "the negros who gave samba to Brazil," it is the tension between these two notions that defines the theft of both camaval and the contexts, at once practical and symbolic, that are associated with it.

Histories: The "Little Bird" of Samba and the Carioca Carnaval The precise history of samba is disputed, but its roots are traced ultimately to West Africa, the homeland of Brazil's colonial slave population. Batuque (or batucada), conventionally defined as the rhythmic drumming that accompanies the Afro-Brazilian religious ceremonies of Umbanda and Candomble (and their predecessors in both Africa and the New World), is thought to represent the basic model from which more explicitly social and secular music and dance styles developed. Although contemporary samba incorporates the complex blending involve dance styles, musical genres, and of many strands of influence-which the evolution of pre-Lenten festivities in the city of Rio de Janeiro-popular accounts continue to emphasize its association with the city's morros. Martha GilMontero, Carmen Miranda's biographer, echoes the romantic language in which samba's beginnings are conventionally imagined and described: From 1870 to 1930 the piquant dance and beat developed in the destitute hillside favelas of Rio de Janeiro-while in town the highbrow Carioca elites listened to French and Italian opera . . . [T]he orchestras of the former slaves forfeited the religious essence of their rituals and the batucada became a profane dance and a melody with a choreography and a rhythm distinctively Carioca. It was in the splendor of the morros that the batucada also softened and turned into samba....

The blacks clapped their hands or percussion instruments in three tempos-two fast and one slow-and danced in a circle. The samba had a relaxing, pleasurable, funny, thoroughly ludic intention.... Social life in the favelas up on the morro centered around it, and the sambistas who created this music acquired the attributes of gods among the black population. The rest of the town ignored the pleasures of the very poor and considered the sambistas as noxious elements.

[1989:25-26] Scholarly histories of samba tend to be more nuanced. For example, John Charles Chasteen has recently argued for a more explicitly "transracial" and "transcultural" history of samba as a dance form. Although he acknowledges that "African traditions form the heart and soul of Brazilian dance," he maintains that "it is a mistake ... to see modern samba as a first-generation child of batuque" (1996:39). Chasteen argues that the lundu and the maxixe, popular dance crazes of the 19th century, represented the "intermediate stages" and "social antecedents" of 20th-century samba (1996:32). Foreign travelers, one of

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12 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

whom Chasteenquotes, described the lundu as "a nationaldance" in which "all classes, when they put aside formality, restraintand, I might add, decency, surrenderthemselves"(1996:36). White Brazilian men were similarly said to "imitate the movements of the blacks a good deal" (Chasteen 1996:36). The maxixe, which eclipsed the lundu in the 1870s, was, like its predecessor,associated with the popularclasses, but during the carioca carnavalof the following decade the dance became, "with its air of subversive wickedness ... a general diversion of middle-class males" (Chasteen 1996:39).

The history of the carioca carnaval is distinct from the history of samba, whetherthe latteris defined as a style of dancing or as a specific genre of music.

Histories of the Rio carnaval, in fact, emphasize its origins in European traditions. Entrudo,evidently the earliest form of pre-Lentenfestivities in the city, involved neither dance nor music but centered, rather,on unruly water fights and the general suspension of social norms. Slaves playfully mocked their masters, and women pelted passing men with balls of wax containing scented water.

Partly because civic authorities objected to the social threat implied by entrudo's general mayhem, it slowly waned, and in the 1840s Rio's wealthy imitated the Parisiancarnival-exclusive masked balls that involved dancing. The festivities moved back to the street a decade later, however, as elite men of the city created parading societies. Although the Rio carnaval is now associated with the povo, these parading societies and their elite participants originally controlled the more public celebrations. As Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz writes, "This type of eminently bourgeois carnivalhad originated around 1856 in Rio, andfor a centuryonly the rich had the rightto paradein the streets during the MardiGrasfestivities. They 'entertainedthe people,' who were relegated to the role of simple spectators and were forbiddenthe possibility of gathering on the street"(1985:14).

Published sources provide different dates for the collapse of this elite control of Rio's public carnaval,but by the latterpartof the 19th century, "groups of tradesmen,laborers and dockworkers, to which were added fringe elements made up of the unemployed and hoodlums" began to test the limits imposed by the authorities (Queiroz 1985:14). According to Chasteen, maxixe converged with carnaval street dancing in the 1880s, "as black dancers carrying drums, tambourines,and assorted other percussion instrumentsinitiated a new kind of carnivalparadingin Rio de Janeiro"(1996:40). Groupsdominatedby poor people of color-variously

called Congos, Cucumbys, cordoes, Ze Pereiras, ran-

chos, and yet later blocos-emerged from clandestine contexts into public visibility. It was duringthe 1890s thatRio's journalistsbegan to use the termsamba to describe the dancing performed by these groups (Chasteen 1996:41). Although such groups and their hybrid,evolving polyrhythmicmusic/dancegenres were officially outlawed, they were particularlydifficult to quell by the turnof the century. "The authorities were doing their best," Chasteen writes, quoting the newspaperJornal do Brasil, "butwho could police that crowd?"(Jornal do Brasil 1903, quoted in Chasteen 1996:42).

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CARNAVALIN RIO 13

As Roberto Moura (1983) demonstrates in his detailed history of samba, carnaval was only one of a number of contexts that promoted the spread of samba. During the first and second decades of the 20th century, a nightlife culture, once clandestine and largely limited to the popular classes, began to expand and attractthe more "bohemian"white men of the elite and developing middle classes. It was evidently in this context, providing as it did additional venues for fresh musical compositions and dancing, as well as the context of carnaval, that the "sambado morro"descended into the city. The Festa da Penha, originally a religious festival celebrated during the weekends of October, became a notoriouscontext in which poor people of color, many of them recentmigrants from the northeasternstateof Bahia, gatheredto "sambathe night away."

They were a target of both conservative journalists and the police, the latter sometimes jailing the participantsand destroying their instruments. Both the Festa da Penha and samba generally were associated with promiscuity, vagrancy, and roguery-the same set of associations that supposedly characterized the hillside communities from which the music and many of its talented composers had come.3 Journalistsand theirreadershipswere divided and ambivalent in theirreactions to samba,the increasinglypublic nightlife associated with it, andthe penetration of black-dominated street groups into the formerly "civilized" and "European"carnaval.Many lamentedthe "Africanization"of the yearly festival and bemoanedthe collapse of social orderit seemed to suggest. One newspaper, on the other hand, "became a particularlyenergetic booster" of new carnaval groups, and in 1906 it organized a contest "to celebrate the efforts of the street dancers" (Chasteen 1996:42). During this fertile period, legal persecution and harassment occurred simultaneously with the creative blooming and popular spread of samba. The contemporaryjournalist Alma Guillermoprietocaptures something of the ambivalence of Rio's elite in her somewhat tongue-in-cheek commentaryon the history of samba. "It was becoming hard to persecute sambistas for playing the music that all Rio was dancing to," she writes; "Cariocas could hardly be expected to refrain from putting on a little black music when they were feeling naughty"(1990:26).

Guillermoprieto's reference to "puttingon a little black music" marksthe emergence of the recording industry in Brazil, the development of which occurred simultaneously with that of modem samba music. In 1917, the parodic samba number"Pelo Telefone" was recorded;most historians of contemporary samba markthis moment as the first triumphof a musical genre that was soon to become world renowned. The song, with sanitized lyrics, was a favorite of the 1917 carnaval,and, with burgeoningrecord sales, samba enteredthe age of commercialization.When radio was introducedin Brazil in 1922, Brazilian and foreign record producersrushed to capitalize on the growing popularityof samba.

Working- and lower-middle-class sambistas began to see the writing and performing of samba as a strategy for upward mobility (Moura 1983:55). The Semana de Arte Moderna ("Moder Art Week"), held in Sao Paulo in 1922, also provideda boost for samba;amongartistsand intellectualsit signaleda movement

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14 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

away from dependence on Europeanstyles anda focus on the themes and images thoughtto be "indigenous"to Brazil-including those "African"culturalmanifestations previously labeled as "barbaric"and "uncivilized." By the mid1930s, foreign record producers were rushing to capitalize on samba, and the white "Ambassadressof Samba,"CarmenMiranda-the stage name of a Portuguese immigrant who had her start in the more "humble"neighborhoods of Rio-was born. In the context of the U.S. Good Neighbor Policy and its burgeoning music industry, commercially producedimages of Brazil's fruity, sensuous exoticism and hip-swinging dances soon became commonplace in North America and Europe.

The first escola de samba was organized in 1928, and others were quickly formed (Queiroz 1985:15). Merging the formal internalstructureand pageantry of the elite paradingsocieties with the sambado morro,the escolas competed for the prizes offered by Rio's newspapers. During the decade of the 1930s, which began with the coup of Getulio Vargas-who did much to promotecertainforms of popular culture as both national and nationalist culture-the escolas de samba, along with the music that carried them along, achieved legitimacy. Although some membersof the elite continuedto turnup theirnoses at such "popular manifestations"in preference for the music of Europe, the participationof the escolas de samba in the carioca carnavalwas formally legalized and, in fact, subsidized by the municipal authoritiesof Rio in 1936.

Recognition and funding came at considerable political and artistic cost.

Only nationalistic themes, which were typically drawn from highly romanticized versions of Brazilianhistory, were permitted.As Queiroz notes, "Thecivil authoritiesforbade any overtly political manifestationor one which might take on a protesting note ... The slightest violation of these rules brought on the automaticdeclassification of the offending school" (1985:16). While ostensibly less constrained,the smaller blocos, such as the one that was eventually formed in the community of Morro do Sangue Bom, respected similar limits. Despite the explicit control of the state and the rigidly regimented organization of the escolas de samba themselves, samba continued to be associated, in Brazil and beyond, with passion, spontaneity, and the unquenchablecreativity of the povo.

It was particularlyduring and after the 1930s that samba and the carioca carnavalbecame simultaneously identified both with images of an authenticating "blackness"(or even "Africanness")and with those of the uniquely hybrid, "mixed" national culture of Brazil. In a sense mediating both images was the performanceof an increasingly self-conscious popularand civic culture in Rio de Janeiro.Much has been made, in the often passionate language of commentary on samba, of the symbiotic relationship among samba, the magic of Rio, and the location of both within discourses and images of national self-representation. Moura, whose book emphasizes the relationship between Rio's diverse and lively neighborhoods and the development of samba, notes that since the turn of the century Rio was the "principal center for the production and consumption of culture"within Brazil and that"thecity was the best expression, and the vanguardof the moment of transitionthat was then Brazilian society"

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CARNAVALIN RIO 15

(1983:30). Samba itself, he asserts, was inspired by the "fascination of the city of Rio de Janeiro" (1983:55). Gil-Montero suggests that samba's precursors were "distinctively Carioca"(1989:25). The rhythm of samba, she writes, "has poetically and musically defined the emotion of the city of Rio de Janeiro" (1989:25). Samba's magic was describedas irresistible and infectious, however, for "it traversedstreet afterstreetin the lips and on the hips of splendid mulattos. ... and seized every opportunityto conquerthe world" (Gil-Montero 1989:25).

Samba and the carioca caraval have long been recognized as critical elements in the conventional discourses and imagery of Brazilian national culture, as monumental representations, really, of what Brazilians and "Brazil nuts"-foreigners who are drawn to the country's "tropical exoticism"-hold most dear."Rio's pre-Lentencarnivaland its Afro-Braziliandance, samba,have been symbols of Brazilian identity since the 1930s," Chasteen notes (1996:30).

Both the real and imaginedhistories of sambafit perfectly with the largerdevelopment of a national identity that was based, to a significant degree, on the notion of democraciaracial and relatedculturalmotifs: The yearsfollowing the FirstWorldWarsaw the developmentof a widely endorsedvision of nationalidentityfoundedon the idea of racialmixing.To many Brazilians,the post-1917apotheosisof samba,understoodas a blendof African andPortuguesemusicalideas,standsas one of the mostpersuasiveemblemsof a cherishedvision of Brazilianidentity,linkedthroughcarnivalto a mythof social levelingwhich,thoughconfinedto the few daysof the festival,still formspartof a unifyingnationalspirit.[Chasteen1996:30] The cooptation and repackaging of samba by members of the predominantly white middle and upperclasses, and its promulgation as a symbol of national culture and sensibility, suggest remarkableparallels with other historically shifting forms of cultural practice and representation in Brazil. The political development of the West African-derived religion of Umbandaand the struggle of middle-class whites to control it is a case in point (Brown 1994; Brown and Bick 1987). As Fry (1982) has arguedin a short but provocative essay, modern Brazilian forms of self-representation-whether constituted through the practices and discourses associated with cuisine, samba, or religion-make liberal use of the "African contribution"to Brazil. Those cultural elements historically associated with African Brazilians have been, Fry argues, racially and politically neutralized.As such, they have been harnessedto the service of representingthe nationalmainstream.

Sinho, one of the most renowned of the early sambistas, no doubt intended to highlight the fluid and flexible boundariesof samba, as well as the freewheeling growth of the genre, when he said, "The samba is like a little bird. It belongs to whoever catches it" (Alencar 1968:57, quoted in Henfry 1981:81). As the comments of Tomas, my sambista informantin Morro do Sangue Bom, imply, however, the continuing transformationof samba has never been a smooth or neutralprocess. Perhapsnow more thanever, poor cariocas of color suggest that the "little bird"of sambahas been stolen and caged. As writtenand oral histories

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16 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

of samba demonstrate,many disempowered poor black composers, who remain anonymous outside of their own communities, have been offered-if anything-a pittancefor theircompositions. Poor sambistasrecall the injustice that lies at the heartof the history of samba,and, in a far more generalsense, contemporarydiscourses among poor cariocas of color suggest that they have never relinquished what might be called a kind of "spiritualstewardship"of samba.

For people such as those in Morro do Sangue Bom, samba may be embraced by the world-and at the present moment, may be commercialized almost beyond recognition-but it remains an invenado do povo, or an invention of the people, and,more specifically, a coisa dos negros, a black thing. Although what my informantscalled the "truesambista"would readily admit that samba is not really "African"but a uniquely Brazilian, or even specifically carioca, synthesis, its "authenticity"is nonetheless conceptualized as rooted in blackness and the sensibilities of pessoas humildes, or humble people.

Although hybridization, white appropriation, commercialization, and mainstreaming ideological processes have surely been at work since "samba came down from the hills," its "deracination"and "neutralization"evidently remain incomplete. As I would argue is the case for many of the everyday discourses, contradictory ideological currents, symbolic forms of self-representation, and social and political practices that characterize contemporary Brazilian culture, deeply racialized meanings and oppositions lie just beneath the surface of public claims of harmonyand unity (Sheriff 1997).

Sambodromo Politics Although attempts to exert political and commercial control over samba began well before the birthof people like Jorge, Joia, andDaniel, for the sambistas of Morro do Sangue Bom the decisive moment came in 1984 with the constructionof the Samb6dromo.4Designed, like the monumentalcity of Brasilia, by the modernistarchitectOscar Niemayer, the arenamarkeda massive shift in carnaval's local and national cultural ecology. The populist governor, Leonel Brizola, liked to imagine that the Sambodromo was his gift to the working classes who supportedhim, but by the early 1990s people in Morrodo Sangue Bom had begun to speak of it as the final straw that broke the back of authentic samba and the Rio carnaval. Previously the spotlight had been on the public squares and the broadthoroughfareswhere the larger escolas de samba shared space with the smaller blocos in a more loosely organized street pageant in which the border between participantsand spectators was blurred or even, at moments, nonexistent.The escolas thatparadedin the Samb6dromowere being "invaded,"as many people said, by middle-class whites searchingless for magic than for fame andfortune.5As before, the spectacle was bankrolledby the city's powerful tourist departmentand by organized crime. With the construction of the Samb6dromo,Brazil's majortelevision networks and their"sponsors"-for whom, arguably,the arenawas built-provided additional promotion and generated even more privateprofits.

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CARNAVALIN RIO 17

Conversations about the theft of carnaval,as I have previously noted, represented one of the few everyday contexts in which people on the morroexplicitly invoked the issue of racism. Daniel, as a formerpassista in one of the oldest and most successful escolas de samba in the city (and thus, one must remember, in the nation and the world), spoke about racism in his country in a very general and vague way until he hit on the subject of samba."Sambais a partof black culture,"Daniel explained: Generallythenegrois moreinvolvedin samba;he hasmorefacilitythanthewhite.

It comes from the root, from the blood really....

In the past, there were more ne-

gros in samba.Now it is very commercialized.The truesambista,the sambista with roots,now he doesn'thavethe opportunityto paradein an escola de samba because,monetarily,he doesn'thave the conditions.Not even to watch[the carnaval]becauseit's veryexpensive,right?Camavalusedto beverygood.Therewasa carnavalof the street.... Now it is veryexpensive;you can't buy a costume....

Youdon'tparticipate.

As Daniel would have been the first to admit, paradingwith the top escolas de samba had always required an investment of time, sweat, and money. Although most of the clubs' rank-and-fileparticipantswere working-class people of color, the poorest of the poor had always been locked out. In 1977, the majority of those who participatedin the big clubs earned between two to five times the minimum wage (Ribeiro 1981). Club members not only paid monthly dues but usually had to produce their own funds to pay for the elaborate hand-sewn costumes. As an air conditioner and refrigeratorrepairman,Daniel had once been able to manage. By 1990, as he sadly pointed out, he could no longer afford the costume of the escola to which he had been devoted, and, adding insult to injury, he could not pay the price of the Samb6dromotickets, which were by then sold for at least half of a minimum monthly salary. Daniel hardly relished his role as a critic on the sidelines, and even could he have afforded the privilege of observing the spectacle from a seat in the arena, he probably would have disdained it. People like him, he suggested more than once, were supposed to be in the spotlight, and what was the point of paying hard-earnedmoney to watch other people having a good time? He had literally been priced out of his own parade.

During the time thatI lived in Morrodo Sangue Bom, Joia tried to teach me how to samba. I was, at least, given points for trying, which I was expected to do at every conceivably appropriatemoment. The samba as dance form, I learned from my first days on the hill, was not reservedfor the carnavalseason. Like the music that propelled it, it was practiced anywhere, anytime, and its flourishes might be mimed to enliven the otherwise tedious tasks of everyday life. Joia's reaction to my bungled attemptswas ambivalent.She suggested that samba was the forte of people like herself-and indeed, her eight-year-old son Tiago could dance the samba and the recent craze from the northeast,the lambada,with such artistry that it brought tears to my eyes-but she often exclaimed, with what seemed like sincere consternation,"How can a person not know how to samba?"

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18 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Our good-humored argument about my failure to "get" samba continued for more than a year and a half. At countless small moments during the day, I pointed out to her, motherswould grabthe tiny hands of theirtoddlers-many of them truly toddling and not yet walking-and samba with them. Once the children could walk across the floor without falling more thanonce, everyone-visiting aunts, uncles, cousins, godparents, neighbors, their own siblings-took them for little samba whirls, singing the refrains of favorite songs, even when there was no music on the stereo. When Joia was pregnantwith her thirdchild, she would sambawith her swollen belly bobbing up and down, clowning. Sometimes she did this at parties, sometimes when she was doing chores aroundthe house. "You see?"I exclaimed many times: "Yourbaby is learningto sambabefore she has learnedhow to breathe!"After she was born, Daniel held his daughter in his armsand took small gentle sambasteps as he softly crooned sambalyrics into her attentive,up-turnedface. Joia, I realized, did not thinkof any of this behavior as pedagogical but simply as what one did with small children, like kissing them loudly on the cheek or tickling their toes. Like Daniel, she thought that perhapssambareally might be "in the blood," a thing of "roots."

As the carnavalseason of 1991 approached,Joia fell more andmore to ridiculing the white women-often from middle-class and even elite families-who in recent years had begun to monopolize the carnavalfloats and the greedy eye of the television cameras. Although she had expressed wonder and even irritationat my failure to learn to sambaproperly,everyone knew, she suggested, that it was mulatas, women of color like herself, who traditionallyperformed and personified the samba as a dance form. Somehow, skinny blondes had literally stolen the show. Joia suggested that her pique was hardly idiosyncratic. Her words were part of a generalized commentary-what she called, in fact, a polemica ("controversy")-that evidently circulated among the morros of Rio. "This is a bad controversy,"she explained, bringing out the magazines once again: "It is because they are preferred.They're all white and they have these nice bodies, you know? None of them are dark. It's bad, you know, because samba is a black thing. It began with the negros.... Look at them!

They're all white, very pretty,but can they samba?No! They can't sambaat all!"

Like Daniel, Joia had sacrificed to parade with the big escolas. Carnaval had always demandedsacrifice from poor people, she told me; but with the advent of the Samb6dromoand what appearedto be the increasing gentrification and "bleaching"of the Rio carnaval,it had gone from difficult to impossible.

As carnavaldrew nearer,Jorge asked me how I was planning to celebrate.

Although I would have a friend visiting from the United States, I refused to consider the possibility of going to the Sambodromo.I was waiting for a plan to congeal among my friends on the morro. Jorge, who was chronically unemployed (except for his occasional gigs as a sambistaat private middle-class parties)had once had the alternative of going out with the community's bloco. Although modest and small next to the big escolas, the local bloco had been intimate and unsullied by the ambitions of outsiders. Jorge's own contributionhad been significant, and when he performeddisciplined work with the bloco, he became an

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CARNAVALIN RIO 19

artist-far more than the image thatpeople in his own community had of him as a washed-up malandro, or rogue, who was given to drinkinghimself into a stupor on Saturdayafternoons. But the days of the bloco, as Jorge explained when we first met, were over. Waving his arm dismissively, he told me how he was planning to celebrate: "To parade with an escola-even the cheapest-is very expensive.... For me, it is better to stay home, drinkingbeer, a little cocktailNo! A huge cocktail!-and watch it all on television. Get rip-roaring drunk, sleep, get up, and drinkmore...."

In the end, my visiting friend and I spent the nights of carnaval on the Avenida Rio Branco, where we met up with people from the morro.Perhapswe always arrivedtoo late in the evening or were positioned too far down the avenue, but the blocos-most of them organized on morros and in working-class neighborhoods-seemed dispirited and exhausted. Several days before carnaval, Daniel had fallen in the shower and cut his hand;he could neither play his tambourinenor mix alcohol with the antibiotics he was taking. I had never seen him so reserved at a party. Other than her freshly marcelled hair and an extra layer of lipstick, Joia had not gone to any lengths to outfit herself for the festival.

We sat towardthe end of the avenue, off to the side, where Tomas and several of his musician friends played old samba tunes for anyone who would listen.

When the caraval season of 1992 arrived, the comments I heard echoed those of the previous year. Yvonne, who like Joia and Daniel had spent her teens and twenties in the thick of Brazil's biggest party,also enteredher thirties to find herself priced out and full of nostalgia for the days when poor, dark-skinned women such as herself were treated, for the five days of carnaval, like the beloved muses of a nation beside itself with adoration.Like most people on the morro, Yvonne did not like to talk about the prejudice and discrimination that dogged her attempts to climb out of poverty, but for her, too, the theft of carnaval was racism writ large. "Ithas ended,"she said, her voice edged with a kind of patriotically inspired anger; "This thing of the carnaval of the negros-it's over."

As had many others, Yvonne explained that carnaval had been stolen not just by the wealthy people of the South Zone who bought their way into the more visible positions in the escolas de samba. To see the floats dominated by white women from the elite neighborhoods gravely offended Yvonne, but she knew that the largerprocesses of the theft were more complicated than the penetration of what people called the "white model of beauty" into the one area where women of color had been given a chance to demonstratetheir valor, or value.

"Only the rich," I heard over and over again, "only the ricos can get into the Samb6dromo."Many of these ricos were gringos, or foreigners, Yvonne told me, who, with theireasy money, contributedto the commodification of carnaval while understandingnothing of what had once been its deeper meaning.6 People on the morro often expressed ambivalence about carnaval's allure for gringos.It was the beautyand "hot"sensualityof the mulatasand the morenas ("brown-skinnedwomen") of Brazil that broughtdroves of foreign men to Rio, many on the morro implied, not the pale offerings of the city's middle-class

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20 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

citizens and its pricier venues. Even foreign women, I was told, came to Rio in search of sexual adventureswith o negro brasileiro ("a black Brazilian man").

The erotic enchantmentof foreigners gave imprimaturto theirtraditionalrole as the stars of carnaval. It was only right that people starving for the sensuous magic of Brazil should come to the Rio caraval, those on the hill suggested; and, for their part, they were honored to entertain and charm an appreciative audience. When I told Joia thatthe nudity thatcharacterizedso much of the modem carioca carnavalwould be considered pornographicin my own country, she invoked the objectification embodied in carnaval-and her own ambivalence about it-when she responded with laughter, "Yeah, right, you all won't show your own bundas [buttocks],but you come down here to look at ours!"

Scholarly debates about the ideological role(s) of the Rio caraval and the racialized meanings that inform them partly overlap with, while remainingdistinct from, discourses among the city's poor people of color. Chasteen, summarizing this scholarly debate, defines it as centering aroundthe political thrustof the festival and its use of samba as a national symbol: The negative view foregrounds socially and racially exploitative dimensions of current carnival activities in Rio de Janeiro. Other authors have sprung to the defense of the popular carnival, however, finding in it expressions of resistance to the cultural hegemony of the dominant class. ... To skeptics the glorification of an Afro-Brazilian dance is a kind of theft, an appropriationof black culture out of context.... What does all this imply about samba as a national symbol? In the final analysis, does it represent a boisterous triumphor a subtle subversion of racial equality in Brazil? Does the ostensible celebration of Afro-Brazilian culture actually underminethe struggle for equity by suggesting that it alreadyexists, as many have argued? [1996:29] For the people of Morro do Sangue Bom, I would argue, this kind of "final analysis" has little bearing on the negotiation of racial meanings in either everyday life or in the extraordinary and ephemeral life of carnaval. Samba may "belong" to negros, it may be a "black thing," an inventao, or invention, of "humble people," but it is its very role as national symbol that makes it such a valuable contribuiqdo, or contribution. Without local, national, and international recognition and the commodification that has surrounded it since the 1930s, the "little bird" of samba, as its traditional stewards know, would never have taken flight.

When people in Morro do Sangue Bom critique the carioca carnaval of the 1990s, they rely less on notions of resistance and cooptation than on the more concrete and practical processes of theft-those that limit or preclude their ac-

tual (as opposed to merely symbolic) participation.The point for them is not that black culture has been appropriatedand depoliticized but that their role as the nationally and internationallyrecognized representatives, producers, and performers of the samba-drivencarioca carnival has been usurped.Although this role is based, to a large degree, on racialized stereotypes and gendered, sexualized forms of objectification, it is one that-with something like an ironic wink perhaps-they have accepted. Although discourses about samba and carnaval may make use of deeply racialized notions of "cultura negra" and may even

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CARNAVALIN RIO 21

speak of "blood," as Daniel did, the emphasis is not on opposition between "black culture" and "white culture" or between racially politicized versus racially neutralized versions of caraval practice;the emphasis, rather,is on the erosion of samba/caraval as a negotiated economic and culturalniche conventionally reserved for poor people of color.

It is evident that the discourses and images associated with samba and the Rio carnaval as a unifying and, in many ways, monumental national spectacle conceal a contraryhistory. Theft, appropriation,and betrayalhave accompanied samba since its inception as a modem genre. The contemporary carioca carnaval, which is conventionally understoodas a demonstrationof democraciaracial and the temporary collapse of class-based boundaries, is the negotiated productof a history of racialized struggles for public space.

Although my informantsmay not be aware of the extent to which their understandingsof the carioca caraval of the 1990s reflect and echo more longstanding struggles, their perception that the construction of the Samb6dromo markeda dramaticshift in the political economy of the festival is certainly accurate. At the turnof the century, the public performanceof poor people of color in the carnavalwas controlled largely throughstate-sponsoredrepression-streetlevel practices that involved intimidation, violence, and imprisonment. At the presentmoment, the struggle for public space is located within the more "impersonal" forces of intensified commodification. The inflated costs of costumes and Samb6dromotickets, the emphasis on television broadcasting,the presence of middle-class and elite whites in the most visible performancepositions, the increased domination of white professionals in the creative management of the parade,and the fact that the Samb6dromocompetition, as a multimillion-dollar monopolizing spectacle, has dwarfed, devalued, and stolen public attention from all other, more local carnaval practices-all of these processes constitute the theft of carnaval.For people like Daniel, it seems, these "impersonal,"structurally racist processes are part of a larger patternthat characterizes the realidade, or reality, of modern Brazil. "They used to beat you with the whip," he said, explaining the continuity between slavery and the racialized conditions of modem wage labor: "Now they beat you with hunger."

It was duringthe carnaval season of 1992-when the poorest people on the morropreparedto honor the nation and drowntheir sorrows without leaving the hill-that I at least imagined that I understoodthe depth of bitterness and longing thatJorge had conveyed when he told me thathe now celebratedcarnavalby watching television and getting drunk. Although the surviving blocos still paraded on the Avenida Rio Branco, the national and internationalspotlight, the glory, the money, and the power were, as everyone knew, focused elsewhere.

Rede Globo, Brazil's widely watched television network, broadcast the tightly packaged Samb6dromo spectacle throughoutthe nation, mesmerizing viewers not only in the urbancentersof the southbutin the farthestreachesof the Amazon.

For people on the morro, I realized, it was not that Rio had ceased to represent and enchant the nation-if anything, the televised spectacle catapulted the

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22 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

carioca carnavalinto nationalism's truly moder age-it was simply that it had sold its soul.

Seeing the spectacle for the first time on the television in Joia and Daniel's home, I was transfixed,and, in empathy with my companions, I felt nearly simultaneous surges of pride and sadness. There on the morro,I was literally rubbing shoulderswith people who had actually gone out with the escolas, who had participated,who had stood (and danced beyond exhaustion) for something. "I didn't know!" I kept exclaiming. Out of loyalty I had adopteda dismissive attitude to high-stakes carnavaland had not, until then, imagined the truly monumental scale of its production:thousandsof people, adornedwith sequins, feathers, and metallic fabrics that caught the klieg lights as they whirled about, their movements obviously choreographedless for the occasional close-up shots than for the bird's-eye telephoto views. "Sonharnao custa nada" [To dream costs nothing], the membersof one escola sang over and over, their centralfloat illuminated by enormousgold dollar signs and reclining women wearing g-strings and hair-to-toe golden body paint. If I stuck my head out the window of Joia and Daniel's house, I could hear the bass notes of the samba percussion all the way from the Samb6dromo. "You never told me it was so big, so incredible," I gushed to Joia; "My countryhas nothing like this, nothing!"There was pride in her answering smile. In a close-up shot, a carnavalesco, who serves as the creative mastermind of each competing escola, was shown with tears streaming down his face.7I asked Daniel why he was crying. "It is very emotional,"he responded in a low and uneven voice. He seemed close to tearshimself.

Although their approachto the issue of carnaval may be more pragmatic than that of scholars concerned with its ideological implications, people in Morro do Sangue Bom may also be one step ahead of such scholars in their understandingof the symbolic undercurrentsof their own role in the festival. At once ephemeralandmonumental,the carioca carnaval,as both scholarsandpeople on the morroknow, is a powerfully moving utopian ritual. Although some have suggested that it is a ritual of reversal in which the rich and poor trade places (DaMatta 1981, 1984), it is also a ritual of intensification in which Brazilians celebrate their own vision of themselves as an amorous, optimistic, unified, and color-blind nation. People on the morro might sneer at the notion that their country is a "racialdemocracy,"yet, during carnaval,they have traditionally conspired in the productionof a nationalist illusion. They have done so not because they are the victims of false consciousness, as some have suggested, but because they honor the dream,delicate as it may be, on which carnaval,as a festival of nationalunity, is based. For poor people of color, the carioca carnavalis less about Brazil as it is than aboutBrazil as it ought to be.

It is this, ultimately,thatmakes the theft of carnaval, seen from the vantage point of people in Morrodo Sangue Bom, such a monumentalbetrayal. Their bitterness is propellednot only by the fact that the mechanics and profits of the festival's production have been commandeered by the already privileged classes-a scenario that many of my informants regarded as "business as usual"-but also by what they see as an erosion of its prescriptivemeaning.

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CARNAVALIN RIO 23

"They're all thieves!" Daniel was fond of remarking. Sometimes he referred to the rich, sometimes to the government, and sometimes, it seemed to me, to the economic and ideological forces that had mangled samba and turned the city of Rio de Janeiro into a money-grubbingadvertisementnot for the nation's fragile and redemptive dreams but for its increasing cynicism and moral decay.

Soon after that year's carnaval was consigned to memory, Rio de Janeiro began to preparefor the Earth Summit. Heads of state and their representatives would, for the first time, meet to hammer out a series of global environmental policies. Representatives from nongovernmentalorganizations devoted to protecting the naturalenvironment were also convening in Brazil. The city of Rio, with its magnificent beaches and breathtakingvistas, was an obvious setting for the meetings. Perhaps, many in Rio hoped, the city could recoup some of the touristdollars that had been lost as a result of the highly publicized street crime and violence of recent years.

Ominously, several weeks before the summit,many of Rio's streetchildren seemed to have disappeared. The military and civil police began what would come to be called a limpeza, or cleansing, of the favelas. The charismaticchefe, or gang boss, of Morrodo Sangue Bom was one of their first victims. His death left the community vulnerable to the incursion of massive, imperialist drugtraffickinggangs, and, a year after I left, the cohesive and vibrantcommunity of Morro do Sangue Bom became memory. The war that led to its demise was so explosive that it drew the attention of internationalmedia.

The "spirit"of Rio de Janeiro and, more specifically, of the carioca carnaval, as I have suggested, is taken to be metonymic of what is most alluring in Brazilianculture and character.As my informantspointed out, the Rio carnaval is (and perhaps always has been) metonymic of darkerforces as well. My informantsspoke of carnaval in much the same way that they spoke of racism and other injustices-including the violence preceding the Earth Summit-that defined their political marginality. Discourses in Morro do Sangue Bom made much use of not only the theme of theft but also thatof concealment and the contrastbetween public visions of the nation and the racialized political economy that trappedpeople of color in what they called miseria ("misery") and fome ("hunger").The glittering surfaces of carnaval,like the polite discourses of democracia racial-both of which are performednot only for Brazilians but also for a transnationalaudience-conceal complex forms of contestation that engage both the political and the moral economy of race in Brazil. Although we are growing increasingly accustomed to discourses that assert the evaporation of national boundaries in the context of postmoder globalization, the traffic in commoditized nationalist symbols and performances, and the often subterranean struggles that surroundit, continues to bend local experience to its will.

In the wake of the gang war of 1993, which consumed Morro do Sangue Bom, most of those who survived fled-some with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Nearly everyone I knew, including Joia and Daniel, left the city of Rio de Janeiroaltogether. In their new home in Niteroi, where I later

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24 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

visited them, their teenage son Alberto had learned to play the guitar. "What's goin' on?" he crooned soulfully, miming the English lyrics of a foreign rock group called Four Non-Blondes. Daniel, visibly aging and worn but not yet 40, kept telling me that the younger generation was abandoning its raizes, its roots.

"They disdain the music of their own country!" he lamented; "Samba! Samba is the best music, our gift to the world!" Although I begged Alberto and his parents to meet me on the morro, now depopulated and occupied by the military police, or in the city-anywhere, just to kill saudades, or homesickness-they insisted, over and over, that they did not miss Rio at all.

Notes Acknowledgments. This article is an expanded version of a paperI delivered in the session "The City as ContestedNation"at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. The idea thatcertain cities, given their actualor symbolic position as capitals of the nation, are often metonymic representationsof the nation, as well as sites of conflict and contestation over such representation, was proposed by Owen Lynch, the organizerof the session. I thankhim for this and additionalinsights and for a close reading of an earlierversion of this article. The article also benefited from the comments of Richard Handler,the session's discussant, and from the comments and assistance of Mario Bick, Vincent Crapanzano,Peter Craumer,and Stephen Fjellman. Dan Segal provided invaluable editorial assistance, and the anonymous reviewers for Cultural Anthropology provided many helpful and insightful comments. The research on which this article is based was supportedby a grant from the Wenner-GrenFoundation for AnthropologicalResearch.

1. Morro do Sangue Bom, and all the names I use to refer to informants,are pseudonyms. Sangue bom is a slang expression that literally translates as "good blood." To say that someone is sangue bom is to suggest that they are "one of us," trustworthy,and humilde, or humble. For many, the termalso has a racial connotation,but unlike so many other terms that refer to blackness, it has a distinctly positive spin.

2. See Sheriff 1997 for a detailed analysis of the experiential bases and political implications of this silence.

3. Histories of samba, especially Roberto Moura's (1983), also highlight the importance of Tia Ciata, a middle-class woman from Bahia. Her home was said to operate as both a temple of the Afro-Brazilianreligion Candomble and as something of a nightclub and dance hall. Marriedto a doctor with political connections and thus protected from the police raids that plagued other such gatherings, Tia Ciata not only acted as a kind of patronto buddingsambacomposers but also served as hostess to the more daring, middle-class whites who clung to the fringes of popularnightlife.

4. Cavalcanti (following Valenca 1983) cogently reminds us that a preoccupation with, and discourses about, the threatened"authenticity"of samba have existed almost since its inception. By 1933 there were evidently debates about whether samba was in a period of decadencia ("corruptionand decline") or if, on the other hand, it was simply undergoing "evolution and stylistic innovation"(Cavalcanti 1990:29).

5. The perception of a white invasion has also been documented by Guillermoprieto, who writes, "Morethan an invasion, it sounded like a gradualbleaching process: whereas in the 1960s middle-class whites had been a rarity at rehearsals,by the 1970s they were accepted members of many samba schools, and in Mangueirain 1988 there were all-white wings with white chiefs" (1990:159). The increasing involvement of

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CARNAVALIN RIO 25

middle-class and elite whites in the planning and performance of carnaval has been documented elsewhere as well, although it has occurred in somewhat different historical and ideological contexts. For example, Fry, Carrara,and Martins-Costa (1988), referring to the period of the early 1980s, detail the strongly racialized competition among carnaval groups in the northeasternstate of Bahia. Focusing on an earlier period, von Simson (1987) examines the forced adoption of the carioca model in Sao Paulo and emphasizes the competition between more traditional carnaval groups and newer ones, which were increasingly dominatedby wealthier, politically connected whites.

6. Many of Rio's middle-class whites, in fact, flee the city during carnaval. As many well-heeled cariocas told me, they do this not only to take advantage of the fiveday national holiday but also to escape the noise and lewdness. (Not all cariocas approve of the explicit eroticism, sexual license, and cross-dressing that stereotypically characterize the modern carioca carnaval.) Although people on the morro insist that middleclass whites have stolen carnaval, many of these whites suggest, usually in polite and implicit language, that they cannot bear the suspension of everyday etiquette that demands that "favelados"maintaina respectful distance from gentefina, or refined people.

Those who escape to quiet mountainand seaside resorts are replaced, however, by North American and Europeantourists, as well as by Brazilians from other cities. Both poor people of color and middle-class cariocas increasingly complain that the Rio carnaval has become a spectacle "for the gringos."

7. Each escola de samba has its own caravalesco. Much celebrated by the Brazilian media, carnavalescos are responsible for the design, organization, and creative management of the escolas' themes. Guillermoprieto traces the professionalization of the carnavalesco role to 1959 (1990:66). Usually middle-class white men with artistic training, carnavalescos are often said to be "from outside." Cavalcanti (following Volvelle 1987) has suggested thatcarnavalescos are "culturalmediators"who construct and control the complicated interchange between "elite culture" and "popular culture" (1990:30). They have thus played a pivotal role in the production of the carioca carnaval as a competitive, professionalized, and commoditized spectacle. See Goldwasser 1975 for a more detailed, if dated,description of the internalorganization of escolas de samba.

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